Just 4 fun, Time travel, a tip, a gift, and a hand (plus a sabotage)

MoonSong

Rules-lawyering drama queen but not a munchkin
I've had this game in my head for weeks. Imagine you can time travel just 4 times:
  • The first time, you can only talk to one person, warn them of something about to happen, presuade them of changing their future decision, or just give them advice.
  • The second time, you can make a gift to another person. Just one item, provided it is reasonable for it to exist in the present and that it can be carried by one person.
  • The third, you are allowed to directly interfere and yourself do something to alter an event. You are waranted success, but you cannot directly interact with anybody.
  • The fourth time you have the most freedom, you can do almost anything you want, provided you prevent someone from achieving something. (No killing or anything like that)
  • Bonus, you can do a fifth and final travel to take something from the past and bring it to the present. You can bring anything you can reasonably carry except for people (no kidnaping).

What do you do with each travel and why?
 

log in or register to remove this ad

1. Right around the time Bitcoin is invented, tell past me to mine as much of it as possible. This is for personal wealth, of course. But it allows me to wait and cash it in now, avoiding any unpleasant butterfly effects.

2. Go one year into the future, give myself the gift of this time travel game. Mainly so that I can fix any problems I cause.

3. [Politics, redacted]

4. [Politics, redacted]

5. I'd want to save as many lost historical documents as possible. I'm thinking that going to the Library of Alexandria right before the fire and grabbing as much as I can carry.
 

Well I guess I should post my ideas.

A tip.- Go to late 1984 and convince Thomas Rattigan to remain at Pepsi and reject that job being offered to him. The arguments are that the board chairman would get very jealous of him, make his life a hell, unjustly fire him, and force him to sue in order to be paid what he is owed. Why? Without Rattigan to turn around his new Company, it would die an earlier -and hopefully less messy death-. (BTW the company is Commodore, and without Rattigan there's also no Amiga 500, so nothing to eat away the Atari ST's lunch. This way when the Falcon arrives, there's still a bigger install base and more third party support. That way Atari manages to keep on living longer, possibly even up to today. Why save one but not the other? In my mind Commodore was fated to fail)

A gift.- Go back to 1974 and give Gygax a winning lottery ticket. Not "uber life-changing money" ticket, but an "enough to publish OD&D and have some working capital" money. Why? I considered to give that ticket to Dave Arneson to make him be a part of early TSR and force Gygax to work out things with him, but he was just too young and not close enough to Gary, so that idea doesn't seem viable. So getting to see a version of TSR fully under Gygax's control is a close second.

A hand.- Go back to April 25th 1986, at early evening, mess with the sensors at the Forsmark Power plant so they erroneously detect high levels of radiation. Then do a pirate radio broadcast over all eastern Europe but specially in Pripyat denouncing that the reactor 4 had a meltdown and now the area is full of deadly radiation with a detailed description of what happened in the Chernobyl disaster and how the shody reactor design is to blame. All of this chaos so that the actual failed test in reactor 4 doesn't happen and the Soviet Government is shamed into actually fixing their reactors. At first I just wanted to go and prevent reactor 4 from getting poisoned, but that would only delay the disaster. Just looking for a way to make them fix their nuclear reactors without a nuclear disaster having to happen.

A sabotage.- Prevent the dude who spilled the beans from telling Mattel about Jem. That way they don't have enough time to make Barbie rockstar before Jem makes it to the market. Hopefully that way Jem gets a chance to make a bigger impact.

Bonus.- Go back to the day my dog was run over by a car and steal him back to the present. It makes no difference between being told he got lost because he got hit by a car, and he actually getting lost. Because I've stolen him back to present day when he can live the rest of his life with me.
 

Remove ads

Top